Search results for "spiders"

There are many species of white-tailed spiders and they are found throughout Australia. Some species are common in urban areas and are often seen in houses. White-tailed spiders usually wander at night, hunting and eating other spiders. The two common species, the Southern and Eastern White-tailed Spiders, Lampona cylindrata and L. murina, are similar in appearance and have overlapping distributions in the south-eastern Australia. Their bites have been controversially and often incorrectly implicated in causing ulceration in humans.
White-tailed spiders are vagrant hunters that live beneath...

Spiders use many strategies to protect themselves from their enemies. One of the most amazing of these is called autotomy. This is the spider's ability to self-amputate a leg that has been grabbed by a bird or other predator. Usually the leg breaks off close to the body, at the coxa-trochanter joint. Even more amazingly, juvenile spiders can regenerate their legs - a tiny, segmented leg grows within the coxal stump and appears at the next moult.
Other strategies include behavioural ploys, like direct threat displays of warning colours on the spider's body, or escaping a predator by...

Spiders can send a chill down a person's back; oh yes, arachnophobia can be a rotten affliction and there's no need to feel ashamed about being arachnophobic in the true sense of the medical word. But the problem that the Bugman faces is that spiders should be viewed with a great deal of respect and awe, simply because they are amazing creatures and thereâ€™s much more to them than we see at first sight of those eight-legged, hairy predators.